Ellen
by Elizabeth England
Summary: Companion piece to Revelin. Details the events leading to birth of Revelin's mother, Voldemort's daughter.


Here is a little companion oneshot to Revelin, just to give everyone some background on the situation. Enjoy!

Puberty hit the Slytherin boys in third year, striking like lightning, sudden and catastrophic. Overnight, it seemed, voices were cracking, acne was cropping up, and hair was appearing in places there hadn't been hair before. The pureblooded boys of Slytherin, the heirs to fortunes and ancient names, stumbled through these changes with a mix of excitement and horror, and acted in those days with far less grace than normal.

Except for Tom, of course. Like with all things, Tom adapted to puberty without the slightest stumble. In fact, in the one or two times in the following decades that Lord Voldemort even reflected back on third year, he would realize that it seemed as if for him there had been no puberty at all, or, alternatively, if it had happened, it had happened so gradually that the transition from boyhood to adulthood was seamless.

At the time, Tom Riddle considered this fortunate, for not only was puberty accompanied by bewildering physical changes, but bewildering feelings—for most boys. Girls you could talk to with no problem one day were suddenly inapproachable the next, and even with your girl-friends you found yourself noticing their figure in a way you hadn't previously. More than one Slytherin boy was found and punished by Slughorn for getting too close with a girl in the broom closet. Only Tom was different.

In fact, Slughorn commented on it one day. "Tom, my boy," he said jovially, after one of the Slug Club meetings, slinging his arm around the younger boy's shoulder, "You are the only boy your age that has retained any sort of sense these past few months. I admit, third and fourth years are generally my least favorite students, because they're so controlled by hormones. You being able to keep your head has made my classes bearable."

Not only did Tom 'keep his head,' but he never felt even the slightest inclination to lose it. True, sometimes he would glance at a girl and think she was pretty, but it was in the rather clinical, detached way that someone who wasn't particularly fond of landscape paintings might look at one particular landscape and acknowledge that, in its own way, it was beautiful. No girl—or boy, for that matter—stirred in young Tom the sentiments other boys seemed to feel. No rapidly-beating heart, no sweaty palms, and no sudden blushing for him. It was as if the part of his brain centered around attraction was switched off, if it had even existed at all.

That didn't mean he didn't realize, with his cold, reptilian logic, that the sudden surge in sexual interest among his peers couldn't be used to his advantage. For if girls had liked Tom Riddle before puberty, they practically adored him after it, a fact Tom utilized extensively during his years at Hogwarts. For if there was anything that Tom Riddle learned as a teenager, it was that (1) while the female gossip network was full of ridiculously trivial information, it did contain within it nuggets of pure gold (such as, 'There's an engraving of a snake on a faucet in the 2nd-floor girls' lavatory'), and (2) that there was little a giggling girl would not divulge to Tom Riddle if flirted with correctly.

Indeed, Tom Riddle reaped the benefits of his own physical attractiveness through school and beyond, and he was so good at charming people verbally that he never actually had to physically touch anyone. This was fortunate, for Tom didn't want to touch anyone else, nor did he want anyone else thinking they could touch him.

Tom realized early on that sex held no appeal for him. He, in fact, thought sex was rather distasteful. He had known all about it, the mechanics of it, long before anyone else in his year, for at the orphanage sex was quite common among the older orphans. Mrs. Cole and the other orphanage assistants focused much of their time on the younger children, who were more demanding, so more often than not they failed to notice the rampant debauchery going on in their halls. But Tom had noticed, and one summer's night, as he listened to two orphans going at it in the adjoining room, the thought had crossed his mind that, with all of its rutting and grunting, sex was rather animalistic.

The thought had stuck. Sex was for animals, and it was certainly below him, the Heir of Slytherin. When the other Slytherin boys snuck girls into the dormitory, or ran to meet them in the astronomy tower, or loudly bragged to their fellows about their latest conquests, Tom sneered internally. How _barbaric_. The way other boys were slaves to their hormones reinforced in Tom the feeling, growing stronger every day, that he was inherently superior to other humans.

Tom found the base barbarism of sex unappealing, but that wasn't the primary reason he avoided it: simply put, he hated the thought of anyone touching him. It made his skin crawl. Everyone was so utterly beneath him that thought of anyone rubbing all over him made him nauseated. He hated, even in flirting, girls touching his arm or his shoulder or kissing him on the cheek or giving him a hug.

He hated people touching him. They didn't have the _right_ to touch him.

He graduated from Hogwarts without having kissed a girl, a fact that would have bothered most boys but brought for him a certain feeling of pride: even in the hormonally-charged atmosphere of Hogwarts he had never succumbed to base desires. In the following years he would use his own sexual attractiveness whenever it suited him, but he never had to resort to the actual physical act, and he quite probably would have killed someone to get his way over having sex with them if it came to that.

He saw the advantage of sex only its base biological use; that is, its purpose in facilitating reproduction. And if his Death Eaters utilized sex only for that reason, he would have…not respected them…but disdained them…less. But his servants were focused only on pleasure, and in fact took measures to prevent pregnancy, which Voldemort thought disrespectful to their own heritage. It was their responsibility to ensure the pureblood lines remained strong, and they, unlike Voldemort, were not immortal, and thus had the imperative to reproduce. Voldemort himself, had he not gained immortality at a young age, might have felt the need to produce a child to continue Slytherin's line. Voldemort would be remiss in his responsibilities towards his ancestor if he failed to ensure that a descendant of Slytherin was walking the Earth.

Which was another reason he was glad to be immortal. He _loathed _children.

His immortality—or, as it actually turned out, his potential immortality—was what made him comfortable with sacrificing his own fertility. It was necessary for one of his darker rituals. Almost all dark rituals required a sacrifice of some sort, but most of the time they were satisfied with the sacrifice of someone else other than the main caster. In other words, Voldemort could kill some worthless muggle and the ritual would accept it. But there was a certain class of rituals that were a bit pickier and required a personal sacrifice from the caster. Voldemort was appropriately wary when it came to these rituals, for he wasn't the sort to like making personal sacrifices, but there came a point where it became absolutely necessary.

He had discovered something wrong with his Horcruxes.

It wasn't that he had done the Horcrux ritual wrong; it was that there was something wrong with the ritual itself. At the time he had had only two Horcruxes, and he had had kept a close eye on them, part out of paranoia and part out of academic curiosity, and through the course of his observations had detected a flaw in the Horcruxes: that is, a gradual decay over time. The Horcruxes weren't as permanent as Voldemort would have liked. This discovery was, of course, alarming, since the thought of his soul _decaying_ was horrifying.

Voldemort had immediately stopped all other activities and launched into research on how to fix it, and the answer had come in the form of a specialized dark ritual. His calculations indicated it would require a personal sacrifice, and his fertility was the first thought to come to his mind. It was really the only option available to him. Typical personal sacrifices included a certain number of years off your life, but since he was immortal (or trying to be immortal), that wouldn't work. Or the use of your wand arm, or your personal fortune. He had no fortune (at the time) to sacrifice, and there was no way he was giving up the use of his wand arm. The only other option was his fertility.

It was, Voldemort thought, terribly cliché. The common sentiment among purebloods was that one was immortalized in one's descendants. In a way, then, Voldemort was sacrificing one form of immortality for another. But cliché as it was, it worked. The Horcruxes were mended, and Voldemort had figured out how to modify the Horcrux ritual to create new, perfect Horcruxes, so at the end of the day there was really no harm done.

Years passed. He grew more powerful, did more research. He traveled across the world, encountered strange forms of magic, studied under powerful, obscure teachers and with dangerous sects till he became more dangerous and more powerful than them all. He created two more Horcruxes in those years, and it was with the creation of his fourth Horcrux that he saw the first physical change on his body: his eyes turned red. They had been flashing red for some years, but they were permanently red now. He was rather partial to the look, but it did present a problem in allowing him free reign through the general populace. He had to place a powerful glamour on his eyes if he wished to go anywhere incognito.

In the spring of 1955, he found mentioned in an obscure text a ritual he desperately wanted to perform. He was in Bhutan, in the library of a monastery. It had taken him months to gain access to the monastery, which was renowned for its eclectic collection of ancient texts, but he was beginning to wonder if perhaps he had wasted his time, for the place seemed to have a disappointingly large number of Light texts. Then he had found, hidden beneath a pile of other scrolls, a small scroll so old it looked like it might fall apart at any moment.

It reeked of dark magic.

Voldemort had taken it carefully, neutralizing the protective spells on it and, glancing rather surreptitiously at the monks who were supervising all the visitors, took the scroll to the back corner of the library where he had set up his desk, near a window overlooking a snowy precipice. Though spring, it was still cold, and a chill permeated the library. Each breath Voldemort took felt sharp and crisp, and his hands were numb as he read the scroll, but he didn't even think of casting a warming charm, so absorbing was the text.

The work was so utterly _brilliant_ that for the first time in his life Voldemort felt an inkling of respect for someone other than himself, because whoever had come up with this ritual had been extremely clever.

Of course, whoever it was hadn't been clever enough to see its full potential, for as Voldemort read the description of the ritual, his formidable mind was already constructing and deconstructing it, examining it for weaknesses and room for improvement, and within an hour he had come up with a way to make it more powerful. The problem was that it would require a personal sacrifice, and Voldemort had nothing he could reasonably sacrifice for it. The realization threw him into a rage, for he desperately wanted to perform the ritual.

It was, in essence, a ritual designed to make a person practically invincible. It created protection against extremely powerful spells. Typically, when dueling, one raised a shield with a wand to deflect an offensive spell. This was perfectly fine when deflecting weaker spells, because less power was needed to do so. However, with extremely powerful spells like, say, the Cruciatius, a shield would be ineffective because the dispersed power of an extremely powerful shield wasn't strong enough to deflect the concentrated power of the Cruciatius. Shields raised with wands, which accessed most, but not all, of a wizard's power, simply weren't powerful enough. The ritual fixed this by eliminating the need for a wand. Instead, it restructured a person's core magic to not only automatically deflect offensive spells, but to briefly absorb the power in the spells, which, while not directly usable, since it was someone else's magic, could be used to invigorate and strengthen his physical body. The only spell, after hours of calculation, that he determined it wouldn't work on was the Killing Curse.

It was perhaps the most useful magic he had ever stumbled across, apart from that of the Horcruxes, and it was devastating that he could find no sacrifice he could use for it.

He spent months studying the ritual. He stole the manuscript from the monks with them being none the wiser (truly, he wasn't sure if they were aware it was in their library) and returned to England to work on it, half-hoping that he could come up with a set of calculations that would allow him to sacrifice someone _else_. Maybe a certain combination of his followers would suffice? They were personal to him, in a way. The loss of key individuals would cause a personal setback…But no, the numbers didn't work out.

It was so _frustrating_, to know the magic to make himself practically invincible but being unable to perform it. He was desperate to complete the ritual: it was exactly what he had wanted from magic, exactly what he had imagined magic being able to do, since entering Hogwarts. He searched relentlessly for an appropriate sacrifice. He even went back and double-checked the aspect of sacrificing the number of years of his life: after all, he was going to live an infinite number of years, and infinity minus, say, five years, was still infinity, so it wouldn't really be a sacrifice, but unfortunately the laws of magic seemed to realize that. And as before, sacrificing the use of his wand arm was out of the question, and sacrificing his immortality, too, was not an option, for obvious reasons. And he still didn't have a significant fortune to give up, so that wasn't possible. He couldn't sacrifice his fertility _again_, so no luck there either.

He even delved into the woolly area of emotion magic, which he had never put much stock in. Perhaps he could do something he hated as a personal sacrifice, like spending a month…no, a week…a day…without magic…? The thought was abhorrent: surely it worked as a sacrifice? But it _didn't_. Which simply reinforced the idea that emotions truly were worthless.

He got nowhere with the ritual, and in those days his temper was black and unbearable. He cursed people for the slightest infraction. Lestrange suffered under the Cruciatus for almost ten minutes for using the wrong tone of voice; by the end of it the man was almost insane, and it took him weeks to recover. His Death Eaters tiptoed around him like they expected to drop dead at any moment. He was in such a foul temper that even their suffering didn't bring him the satisfaction it normally did. He finished torturing him with his hands still clenched and his heart still beating fast, teeth almost bared.

It was with great reluctance that Abraxas Malfoy invited Voldemort to his Christmas party. He thought about refusing—Abraxas would have that little brat around, which would make him cranky—but the thought of his Death Eaters gathering together and possibly gossiping about him made him even crankier, so he went.

It was a lavish event, like all Malfoy celebrations were. Voldemort hated it. He hated the stupid snowflakes falling on the guests, and the stupid twinkling fairies in the trees, and the fact that everyone seemed to be in an unusually good mood. He hated even more that a lot of important Ministry officials were there, so he had to be his usual charming self, which was especially taxing when forced into conversation with some loathsome witch named Delilah Umbridge. Voldemort started thinking of ways to kill her before she even opened her mouth. It didn't help that she was simpering all over him.

The night would have been a total waste, and indeed, one of his Death Eaters might have died by the end of it, had he not wandered into one of the more private rooms sometime later, where some of his Death Eaters were chatting about their latest sexual escapades. It was a miserable topic, but between hearing about their sexual conquests and enjoying the company of Delilah Umbridge, Voldemort chose his Death Eaters. He could always intimidate them into silence if the conversation got too raunchy.

When he joined them, Avery had been in charge of the conversation, regaling the group with some tale of a five hundred year old vampire with a bizarre sexual identity problem. Voldemort oddly found his attention wondering to what, exactly, he would do should any of his Death Eaters exhibit the same identity problem, and found himself both disturbed and amused. The thought train was so distracting, however, that he didn't notice when the conversation shifted to something else, and it was only with the utterance of a key word that he found his attention crashing back to Earth:

"—_sacrifice_ her virginity for a cause, and I said, 'Yes, you should sacrifice your virginity for a cause. _Me._' And I—"

_Sacrifice._

Voldemort stilled for a moment, shock like ice freezing him. Then he abruptly whirled around, striding quickly to the fireplace without saying a word. His hands shook at his side, his heart raced in his chest, and his head reeled with the possible implications, but no, it couldn't work, that was just too strange, too bizarre, surely it didn't count—

"My lord?" cried Malfoy in alarm, seeing him leave. But Voldemort waved him away distractedly, his mind focused on only one thing, and before Malfoy could say anything, Voldemort had stepped into the fireplace and vanished.

He worked feverishly through the night, his heart racing, his palms sweating, practically shaking with both dread and excitement. This could be it, this could be the break he had been looking for, but it also could be a terrible disappointment. If this didn't work, it was possible nothing else would. Voldemort didn't want to think of that possibility, but uncertainty lingered: the thought kept on cropping up in the back of his brain that to "sacrifice" your virginity was completely unorthodox—indeed, for most men losing their virginity wasn't a sacrifice at all; they couldn't wait to get rid of it. And besides, the thought brought with it such uncomfortable implications—that he was a virgin was a bit uncomfortable to say, since it had so many innocence connotations, and he wasn't innocent at all, and if Voldemort had honestly ever thought of anyone losing their virginity as a sacrifice, he would have thought it would be a sacrifice for a girl, which gave the whole thing a feminine characterization he found uncomfortable, but _still_: he had considered going a month without magic to complete this ritual. He could swallow all the feminine implications and the actual physical discomfort of sex if it would actually _work_.

It would. It took two weeks of calculations for him to ascertain that, since it involved a branch of tactile magic he had never found much use for, but it would work. His hands shook when he realized it, and he spent much of that day pacing back and forth in a rare lack of restraint, running his fingers through his hair again and again, an abhorrent smile on his face. His chest heaved at the thought of it, that it would _work_, that he could become _invincible, _and he spent three whole days delighting over it, that he had finally gotten this puzzle solved, before reality set in and he realized he would have to have sex.

The second he thought of it, a grimace crossed his face. He tried to picture the act in his head, and his skin crawled. _Disgusting_. This sacrifice would be decidedly more sacrificial than the last: he hadn't cared to be rid of his fertility, but to be rid of his virginity would be decidedly more uncomfortable.

But he had a war to wage, and the ritual would help exponentially with that effort. He started searching for an appropriate female, and the task produced disappointingly few results. He had a few criteria that were absolutely necessary: (1) she had to be a pureblood, (2) to minimize risk in the ritual, she could not be a virgin, and (3) she could not be one of his followers, because that created too much awkwardness in the ranks. It would be a bonus if she was pretty, but it wasn't a necessary qualification. He would require…help…no matter how pretty she was.

He settled on Eliza Goodwin, a girl from a respected neutral family. She was pretty, but her features were a bit too sharp for her to be a true beauty. He knew she was no virgin, but neither was she a slut, and he knew she was at least mildly attracted to him. He would take her after Avery's birthday party.

He prepared his bedroom beforehand, marking out the special ruins on the floor around his bed and then covering them with a rug. He took a potion before he left to make things…easier, and dressed more sharply than usual for Avery's party, glamouring his eyes since he knew the red tended to make women leery…except for Walburga Black. But she was special.

He found her at the party in good spirits, though already a little tipsy. "Why Mr. Riddle," she cooed, batting her eyelashes and inching closer, "you look very nice tonight."

Voldemort smiled charmingly. "My dear," he said, lowering his eyes a bit to look at her over the rim of his glass of wine, "I don't hold a candle to you."

She giggled like a schoolgirl and flushed, though Voldemort wasn't sure if it was from the wine, the compliment, or both. The conversation degenerated rapidly from there, and with Eliza becoming tipsier and tipsier, soon there was no need to talk, as their flirting became more…physical.

Her touches invoked in Voldemort a disarming sensation. His skin crawled where she touched it while at the same time his heart beat rapidly in his chest at the sensation. The part of him that wasn't alarmed at the differing sensations coldly deduced that it must be his body's natural reaction warring with the potion's induced reaction.

He didn't like it.

Nevertheless, he escaped with Eliza into a more private area of the garden, and there he had his first kiss. He didn't think it was romantic or even enjoyable, though Eliza seemed to like it, and he noted quite detachedly that his heart was pounding rather quickly inside of him, and his entire body felt warm. He felt a strange stirring feeling he deduced must be arousal, and for the first time ever understood slightly why his Death Eaters were so obsessed with sex, if these strange physical sensations preceded it.

He took her to his room.

Sex was…strange. Intensely pleasurable, from a physical standpoint. He would concede that much, even if Eliza was too tipsy to be a fully active participant. But it was also messy and disgusting and _personal_. Worse yet was that, between the potion and the physical power surge from the ritual, the actual physical desire didn't fade till five rounds in, which he understood to be an exorbitantly long time. He just wanted it to be over with. He wanted these strange sensations to fade. As enjoyable physically as it was, he didn't like the feeling of not being in control of his body, of pleasure being drawn out from him without him being able to help it.

When it was done and Eliza had passed out from exhaustion, Voldemort slipped out of bed, feeling absolutely disgusting and crankier than ever, yet somehow loose and relaxed too. He had the bizarre urge to sleep and kill someone at the same time, which made it a pity he had already resolved not to kill Eliza Goodwin; the consequences of killing the woman he had lost his virginity to were unclear in his calculations; he didn't want to jeopardize its obvious success.

He didn't want to see her again. In fact, he wanted to forget the whole affair ever happened. And for the most part he was successful, for he didn't encounter her at any of the social events he made himself attend, and she didn't seek him out, for which he was grateful.

Until he received a letter from her at the beginning of March.

_Dear Tom_, it read. The appellation made Voldemort scowl. _Please meet me in Room 3 of the Leaky Cauldron at 8 tonight. We have something very important to discuss. ~Eliza Goodwin. _

That she could be pregnant never even crossed his mind. In fact, it was his curiosity about what she wanted to discuss—had she perhaps noticed a side effect of the ritual?—that compelled him to go to her, though he normally chafed at and ignored anything that could be perceived as a summons.

She was already there when he arrived, sitting on the bed, wringing her hands. She was dressed somberly: plain black robe over a plain black dress, hair pulled back in an elegant bun. Voldemort quirked an eyebrow upon seeing her. Eliza had always struck him as one to dress more…outrageously.

"Tom," she breathed, rising from her seat, her eyes anxious. "I'm glad you're here."

Her familiarity took him off guard. He had spent so much time despising her that it startled him to suddenly recall that she still saw him through the charming façade he had created. He recovered quickly, though.

"Eliza, dear," he said, softly. "You are well?" His eyes flicked over her curiously. Though somber, she appeared to be in good health.

She blushed. "W-well, I-I-….y-yes, I suppose." She glanced nervously at the ground, then up at him through her eyelashes.

It was a peculiar reaction. It made him wary.

"T-Tom," she said. Her eyes darted to the ground again. Her hands twisted. "Th-there's no really way to say this…but that night…well…" She took a deep breath. Voldemort listened curiously. What about that night? Was her magic acting strangely? "Tom, I'm pregnant." There was a pause. "You're the father."

Silence.

For a long,

long

_long_

time.

_Pregnant?_

Pregnant! That was impossible, at least by him! The little _whore._ Rage boiled up in him. His lips tightened. "Mine?" he repeated. He didn't try to hide the inflection of doubt.

She turned pink. "Of course it's yours!" she exclaimed indignantly. "You're the only one—I haven't—you're the only person's it could possibly be!"

He opened his mouth to contradict her, scathingly—it was _impossible _for him to have children!—when he skimmed her mind, and his mouth snapped shut. She actually_ believed_ what she was saying!

Something had obviously happened to her. Maybe she had been raped and then obliviated. Whatever the case, he needed to resolve this quickly before she pressed him into an awkward situation.

"Eliza," he said gently, trying to cool her down, because he could see she was working herself into a rage. Pregnancy hormones. "That's impossible." He swallowed. For some reason he didn't want to admit his infertility, but it was the fastest way to calm her: "I can't have children."

"Well, you're about to!" she snapped. "I know it's probably inconvenient, but—"

"_No!_" he said sharply, his eyes glittering as they fell on her. She quieted for a second, startled. "I mean," he said more gently, in the ensuing silence, "I cannot physically have children. It's impossible. A magical…accident… a few years ago."

She looked confused. "But that's impossible!" she stammered. She pointed rather indignantly to her stomach. "This _is _your child! The mediwitch did a paternity spell! You were it! Your name!—_What do you mean you can't have children?_"

Ice trickled down his spine. His breath came shallowly. He felt the strangest sensation, like he had just discovered he had been walking on air all his life, and upon now discovering it, was about to fall. Butterflies fluttered in his stomach. What if she was telling the truth?

But she couldn't be. That was _impossible!_ Dark magic had ripped him of his ability to have children, and only dark magic could…return…it. The room spun. His mind reeled. Was it…_possible_ that the ritual…it _was_ a _strengthening _ritual…could it have, for just this once opened…a window of fertility? One dark magical ritual, negating the effects of another unintentionally? Tactile magic was a strange field of magic, one he had not fully explored. It was intimately connected with emotion and intention, and if it at any point during sex Eliza had thought, however drunkenly, about wanting children with him, then the magic _could have_ made it possible…

He felt as if the world was slowly tilting. He would need to do some testing. He needed to confirm it, make sure it was his.

"I—" he started, reeling. He felt a headache coming on. "I need to …think." He lurched from the chair and escaped into the hall.

_Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. _What did it mean? What should he do? His mind kept on returning to the idea of her being pregnant and then shying away from it, as if the thought was both painful and attractive. His thoughts whirled round and round, one after another, so many going in so many different directions that he started to feel overwhelmed.

He had to stop! He had to have time to think. He had to consider all the implications. He need not act rashly. Acting rashly was for Gryffindors.

After a few moments, he had calmed. He took a deep breath and re-entered the room. Eliza looked up when he entered. Her eyes were wet with tears. "T-Tom," her voice warbled.

He laid on the charm. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said gently, earnestly, approaching her and clasping her hands in his. "It's just such unexpected news. It's supposed to be impossible. Do you mind—just so I can better accept the idea of it—if I double-check the paternity spell?"

She nodded, sniffing. "Go ahead." Her voice sounded watery.

He performed the spell quickly, and sure enough it was the name Tom Marvolo Riddle that appeared in dark green flame above her stomach. The sight sent a strange lurch through his stomach, but he squashed it.

He swallowed and looked up at her. She appeared terrified.

"I need some time to think about this…Eliza." He shifted. "I need to do some research on my…medical problem"—dark ritual—"to make sure there aren't any problems…with the baby." Like figure out what the hell it meant for a baby to be conceived in a dark ritual.

She looked even more terrified. "Problems?" she echoed in a high, panicky voice.

He smiled reassuringly at her. "I'm sure it's nothing, Eliza. But I'll need to make sure. Give me a few weeks to research it. But stay healthy and go to your check-ups." He wasn't sure why he was saying this, except that it seemed like something he ought to say.

She nodded, looking dazed.

He straightened and grabbed his cloak. "I will contact you soon, when I have learned more, so we can decide what to do."

So _he _could decide what to do. He fled before she could say anything else.

AAAA—Page Break—AAAA

The next few weeks were among some of the most bizarre of his life, full of so many conflicting emotions that it put him a towering temper, and his Death Eaters learned quickly to stay away from him if at all possible. He threw around Crucios indiscriminately, when he wasn't holed up in secluded rooms, researching the various implications of the pregnancy.

But he didn't actually research the pregnancy first. Instead he researched the effect the ritual had on his Horcruxes. His fertility, the price he had had to pay to maintain his Horcruxes, had been briefly restored, and he had to make sure his Horcruxes hadn't been badly affected by it. They seemed to be functioning the same as normal when he checked him, but with slightly more decay. He did a few careful calculations and determined that they had decayed when his fertility had returned to him and returned to normal when it had once more left him. It was a relief to know there hadn't been any permanent damage.

On the matter of the baby, much more research was required. He theorized that the tactile nature of the ritual was what had let to his sudden fertility, so he focused his research mostly on that, pouring over every manuscript on tactile magic that could be found, and for good measure, over every manuscript relating to fertility and pregnancy as well. It took two months of research, several trips into his own Pensieve, five visits with Eliza to examine her and probe her mind (her memories of that night were frustratingly hazy), and several consultations with tactile magic experts before he determined, with no small disappointment, that the child was simply…normal.

The pregnancy had resulted from Eliza's _intent_, which had facilitated his fertility. He had determined though, through various complex spells, that the actual conception had not taken place until a day later, when Eliza's egg had been released. Thus the child was not actually conceived during the ritual, and all tests indicated it was normal. It was disappointing. He had thought, that if the child had been conceived _during_ the ritual, then it might have special properties and some clever use might have been found for it; as it was, it hadn't been created till the last vestiges of dark magic had been drained from Eliza's body, so it had no such properties and no strategic use.

For perhaps the first time ever, Voldemort didn't know what to do.

He hadn't considered the possibility of fatherhood since sometime in second year, before he had learned about Horcruxes and when he had discovered his relation to Salazar Slytherin. He had expected, rather distantly at the time, that he would someday need to continue Slytherin's line, but as that had been far off, he hadn't put much thought into it. And then he had discovered Horcruxes, and he had put no more thought into it at all.

He did not want to be a father. Yet he was wary of getting rid of the brat. The easiest thing would be to make Eliza get an abortion, but he was uncertain about the repercussions resulting from messing with the reproductive system of his counterpart in a Dark, sex magic ritual, especially when the child had indirectly resulted from that ritual. It would be rash to eliminate the child, and it would take months more of detailed research to ascertain that doing so wouldn't aversely affect his invincibility, and even then it wouldn't be certain. No, no—the child wasn't worth risking his invincibility over. The brat would have to live.

But what to _do _with it? Obviously, marrying Eliza Goodwin and settling down was absolutely out of the question. Yet that was exactly what society would expect him to do, if it was ever found out, and a failure to do so would result in Tom losing the perfect image he had spent years crafting—an image he still needed. Eliza Goodwin would have to keep her damn mouth shut. That she was pregnant with his child could not be known. By anybody—least of all Dumbledore.

Voldemort didn't want anything to do with the kid, and he would have happily shut Eliza Goodwin up and never seen her again had not the uncomfortable thought crossed his mind that that was exactly what his loathsome father had done to his mother and him, and the thought made him so furious that he killed three of his own Inner Circle members in the following week. Life was just so _complicated_, because he loathed Eliza and the child but he loathed his father even more, and his mind kept on flicking back and forth between what he wanted to do with the kid, and each plan was intimately connected with feelings of his own father, which he hated and made him murderous, and he had to work very very hard not to kill Abraxas Malfoy or any other Death Eater who mentioned sex because sex was what had gotten him into this damn situation in the first place!

In the end, it was another loathsome party that decided him. This one was thrown by the Ministry, and there had been a lot of children there. One of them interrupted and threw an absolute temper-tantrum, screaming at the top of his lungs during the middle of the party, when his mother denied him sweets.

No children for him. Never never never.

It wasn't the same thing, he comforted himself that evening, as he made his way to Eliza Goodwin's house. He wasn't being like that despicable muggle. His father had left his mother with _nothing_, and he had grown up in a muggle orphanage. Eliza Goodwin came from a wealthy family, and if worst came to worst and she was unable to take care of the brat, Voldemort would make sure the child was placed in an appropriately Dark family. Voldemort would never have to know the kid and still fulfill the only paternal obligation he was willing to acknowledge. He would prove himself to better than his own father in…_family _matters, and that would be the end of that. He was relieved to come to a decision.

He dropped by the Goodwin House. When he left, Eliza Goodwin was under the peculiar compulsion to not tell anyone under any circumstances that Tom Riddle was the father of her child, nor to let anyone take a paternity test. Whenever anyone asked her, later in her pregnancy, who the father was, a feeling of horror and dread would overwhelm her and render her unable to even think, let alone tell anyone. And so the months passed.

The child was born on a cold October night in 1956. Voldemort was not there at the time, nor would he have cared to have been. Her mother named her Ellen, and she sent Voldemort notice of the birth via owl post. Voldemort read the letter (he was in Turkey at the time) and thought, _So. It is a girl_. The only emotion he had felt about the birth was a tinge of annoyance that it had changed his identity. He was now technically a father, and though he didn't care one way or another about the child itself, it annoyed him that someone else could add to his identity without his express approval. Still, it was what it was. He burned the letter and checked out of the hotel. His next destination was Syria, and he had a meeting at noon he didn't want to miss.


End file.
